The most farcical non-game of cricket

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The Toronto Nationals won the 2024 Global T20 Canada. The tournament had one of the most farcical non-games in cricket history. It involved moving boundary lines, a one-over game, a forfeit, and most importantly, Shakib Al Hasan.

When you hear that Shakib Al Hasan is involved with anything, it automatically piques your interest. Almost everything involving him is extreme. I promise you that this Global T20 was very Shakib and very full on.

All of this happened in Canada, which was almost a Test playing nation once. They were that good a team and were seen as potentially on the rise. And if you go back through the history, they played the first ever international game against the USA. They just had their best win ever in cricket when they defeated Ireland in that last World Cup. And to be honest, they probably should have beaten the USA as well.

But the reason we're talking about Canada today is how it links directly with the Global T20, a tournament that has a bit of a weird, spottier history. It's not like the MAX60 in the Cayman Islands, which we maybe need to talk about another day.

The Global T20 has clearly had its issues. For instance, there was a time that the players refused to go out and play because they weren't being paid at the time. So this is not exactly a league that inspires a lot of confidence.

The interesting thing about the Global T20 is some of the players that are involved. Steve Smith, Kieron Pollard and David Warner have played in it. Usman Khawaja was captain in this time, and I didn't even know he still played T20 cricket. Sunil Narine and Colin Munro were actually involved in this game. These are major T20 players that we are all aware of, yet they go off to Canada. It means there is a little bit of money in this league.

Then we have then the Bangla Tigers, which is interesting because we've seen most franchises are aimed at the Indian market and occasionally at the Pakistani market. A Bangladeshi franchise is slightly different, and in order to make it proper Bangladeshi, you need to have Shakib Al Hasan involved.

Remember, this is a Bangladesh team. The government was forced to resign after nationwide protests, and Shakib Al Hasan is a former member of parliament. In fact, there are already thoughts about whether he should be playing because he's a politician. A young man died in Bangladesh, and in the FIR from the young man's father, he actually has Shakib as one of the people listed on that. But he was not in the country when the murder happened.

In the Global T20, The Toronto Nationals are playing against the Bangla Tigers. If you look at the points table, the Tigers finished higher than the Nationals. There is an eliminator that needs to be played, but the problem is that there is a lot of rain coming. If this match is rained out, the Bangla Tigers will go through to the next game.

But this is where it gets really, really confusing. We've already done a podcast on this with Anirudh Suresh, which talks about the side of the Bangla Tigers. He also wrote a great article for Cricket.com.

Since then, I've also talked to Joy Bhattacharya, who was involved in the Global T20. He said that the Super Over rule to decide the match was sent before the play-offs. The Bangla Tigers clearly indicated to him that they thought there should be no game. He told them that this was not for him or them to decide, it was up to the umpires and the match referee.

There was also no question of ever rescinding a decision where one captain did not come for the toss. It was not fair on any of the other teams, including qualifiers 1 and 2 who could also have asked for their match to be rescheduled.

So we have been able to get both sides of the story. It doesn't make it any less fun. If anything, it makes it more like a weird cricket version of Rashomon.

Because they were expecting lots of rain, they went out and got covers. I don't know what the covers were like before then, but the one thing that would tell me about the conditions is that there were a lot of low scores in this tournament so far. There were some very good players in this tournament, like David Warner, Rahmanullah Gurbaz and Colin Munro. Yet, it was low-scoring.

They knew there was going to be more rain, and they got more covers. The issue here, especially when you talk to the Tigers people, is that the covers directly came from the Nationals.

A lot of this is about motivation. The Tigers would want this game to be washed out because they were ahead in the points table, while the Nationals want to play so they have a chance of going through to the next one.

From a Global T20 perspective, what they really wanted was some cricket because a lot of games had already been washed out earlier in the day. So the conditions were absolutely terrible and the worst thing that could happen would be for them to get no cricket. That's always a bit of a dangerous way of looking at things. Of course, authorities should do anything they can to play cricket as long as it is within the bounds of normal, acceptable cricket.

This is when it gets very weird. They essentially bring in a new regulation that says instead of having to play a five over game, you can actually play a one over game. In T20 cricket in general, you have to play a minimum of five overs per team for it to be considered a proper game of cricket.

They kept calling it a Super Over, but it's not a Super Over. It's a one over game. They essentially said they are willing to have a one over game because they need some cricket to be played. There was some confusion about whether it was official because it came through WhatsApp, but they said that was an official decision and they were just communicating to the owners that way. 

Is it actually worth having some cricket when its a single over? This was a qualification game, and they made it a soggy, barely watched, coin toss.

But if the rain and the conditions were so bad that they couldn't play a five over game, why were they safe enough to play an over each? Either the conditions are safe enough to be able to play five overs because you don't have much time left, or they're not. It seems very weird to me that they would ever be thinking about playing a one over game. How did they know they were going to lose so much time that it was going to be needed?

But it doesn't just stop here. Let's have a look at the boundaries. At the start of the day, the boundaries were put out in the correct positions. They have to be an ICC standard amount, which to be fair, a lot of grounds don't even have anyway. But there was an idea that it had to be around that minimum 60 metre mark.

However, because of all the rain, they started to actually change where the boundaries were. The Bangla Tigers will tell us that they were gerrymandered to make sure that they were around puddles, the lines weren't completely straight, no one was measuring them, and that it was a complete guess.

Global T20 tell us that's not the case. But either way, the boundaries were changed. And I was trying to think of whether I'd ever seen the boundaries being brought in because of a puddle. I don't know if the conditions were good enough for a five or a one over game at that point, if that's what they were doing.

There is another thing that I want to bring up here. If you forget the changing conditions and boundaries, there is something to be said for just trying to get some cricket on. How many times do we watch games and think why can't they do something to actually make this game go ahead rather than not having one? On that level, you have to give the Global T20 a big tick. It's just that this makes no sense and this is a bit weird.

So there is a toss and this is where it gets a little bit more rush along. Because according to the Global T20, when the toss happens, Shakib does not come out. According to the Bangla Tigers, he did go to the toss. I don't know what exactly happened here. 

I think the general feeling among the Bangla Tigers was probably that if it wasn't good enough for five overs, then it wasn't good for one over. Essentially, by saying that they're not going to play that game, they forfeit it. 

There were many issues with people from the Bangla Tigers trying to talk to the match referee directly, which is never a good idea when it comes to fixing regulations.

Ultimately, the decision was made to forfeit the match. So the Toronto Nationals won the game, and not the Bangla Tigers.

There are lots of people involved in the Global T20 around match referees and umpires who at this stage basically believe that that game is forfeited because Shakib did not come out for the toss. I suppose a better way of putting it is that the team was not prepared to play. 

But that is not where this story stops, of course.

I'm going to say there was a secret 4 AM meeting, and I only say that because I don't think everyone was involved. But certainly the Bangla Tigers, probably people from the Global T20, and also maybe some of the other owners – including the Nationals.

Was this official or casual? I'm sure that will be debated for the rest of time, but there certainly was a very late meeting. And at some stage during that meeting, they decided they would play a five over game the next day.

This is where it gets a little more weird because we know that the game was forfeited and there was this long meeting. But this is where the social media side of it gets really tricky, because these are public games. Players like Colin Munro and Shakib Al Hasan were involved in it. There would have been people who wanted to watch it or follow their favourite players.

The Global T20 didn't actually announce what had happened that night on their social media. There was no announcement of a forfeit. It's just that that game ceased to exist at the time it was supposed to be played.

The Bangla Tigers are now in a situation where they believe that there is actually going to be this game played the next day and they turn up the following day to play this game. The Nationals, however, have decided that they're not going to play this. The decision to make the forfeit actually stood because they didn't say there was any reason to change that.

I would assume that the match referee and the Global T20 all had their say about what should happen. And they decided that the Nationals would win that game. But this is what gets even more funny when you look at everything that has happened here. They don't just win the game by a washout. They also go on to win the entire Global T20. And this is how they got there.

I'm not 100 percent sure where the truth is and I wasn't on the ground. And it might take many more years to finally work it out. But what I would say is that this hasn't made the Global T20 look like the greatest organisation on Earth. It's also quite strange that they were so desperate to play some cricket, despite the fact that the Bangla Tigers were higher on the table. You can also understand the Global T20's point of view. They're probably just saying that the Bangla Tigers wanted a washout to automatically go through to the next round.

Once you put Shakib Al Hasan in any situation, it all just goes a little bit more dramatic than anyone imagined it could have.